Category: Geek Software of the Week

Sometimes there is a utility that forces you to have an extra GSotW! These utilities are THAT good! It covers SO many areas that will help speed up your PC… you NEED to download them and use them! Seriously! You will notice the difference! And, of course, they are free!

Glary Utilities – Glarysoft

“Glary Utilities is the #1 free, powerful and all-in-one utility in the world market! It offers numerous powerful and easy-to-use system tools and utilities to fix, speed up, maintain and protect your PC.

• Optimize, clean and boost the speed of your Windows.
• Protect your privacy and security.
• Block spyware, trojans, adware, etc.
• Fix certain application errors.
• Simple, fast and User friendly interface
• For only private use

Glary Utilities offers numerous powerful and easy-to-use system tools and utilities to fix, speed up, maintain and protect your PC. It allows you to clean common system junk files, as well as invalid registry entries and Internet traces. You can manage and delete browser add-ons, analyze disk space usage and find duplicate files. You can also view and manage installed shell extensions, encrypt your files from unauthorized access and use, split large files into smaller manageable files and then rejoin them. Furthermore, Glary Utilities includes the options to optimize memory, find, fix, or remove broken Windows shortcuts, manage the programs that start at Windows startup and uninstall software. Other features include secure file deletion, an Empty Folder finder and more. All Glary Utilities tools can be accessed through an eye-pleasing and totally simplistic interface.”

Looking for a great, free, hard disk utility? Well, look no further than HD Tune! Check out what it can do!

HD Tune Disk Utility

This is a great tool for benchmarking, testing, and just generally getting familiar with your hard drive. Can you trust your data to a hard drive that hasn’t been adequately put through it’s paces? Well, now you can! And, it is FREE… I love FREE! There is a “Pro” version, and if you need it’s advanced features, go for it!

“HD Tune is a Hard Disk utility which has the following functions:

* Benchmark: measures the performance
* Info: shows detailed information
* Health: checks the health status by using SMART
* Error Scan: scans the surface for errors
* Temperature display

HD Tune may also work with other storage devices such as memory cards, USB sticks, iPods, etc.”

So, you need a KVM (Keyboard-Video-Mouse) but you don’t want to spend any money… is that your problem, bubbie? Well, the Doctor is here with a prescription for you! I just LOVE Open Source! A FREE, Open Source project called, “Synergy” allows you to connect Windows and Linux systems over the network (TCP/IP) and share a keyboard, Video and mouse to “de-clutter” that messy desk of yours! How cool is that?

Synergy Web Site

“Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all. With synergy, all the computers on your desktop form a single virtual screen. You use the mouse and keyboard of only one of the computers while you use all of the monitors on all of the computers. You tell synergy how many screens you have and their positions relative to one another. Synergy then detects when the mouse moves off the edge of a screen and jumps it instantly to the neighboring screen. The keyboard works normally on each screen; input goes to whichever screen has the cursor. You can arrange screens side-by-side, above and below one another, or any combination. You can even have a screen jump to the opposite edge of itself. Synergy also understands multiple screens attached to the same computer. Running a game and don’t want synergy to jump screens? No problem. Just toggle Scroll Lock. Synergy keeps the cursor on the same screen when Scroll Lock is on. (This can be configured to another hot key.) Do you wish you could cut and paste between computers? Now you can! Just copy text, HTML, or an image as you normally would on one screen then switch to another screen and paste it. It’s as if all your computers shared a single clipboard (and separate primary selection for you X11 users). It even converts newlines to each computer’s native form so cut and paste between different operating systems works seamlessly. And it does it all in Unicode so any text can be copied. Do you use a screen saver? With synergy all your screen savers act in concert. When one starts they all start. When one stops they all stop. And, if you require a password to unlock the screen, you’ll only have to enter a password on one screen. If you regularly use multiple computers on one desk, give synergy a try. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.”

Do you have so many passwords to so many websites, applications, etc., etc. that you just can’t remember them all? Are you writing them down on a napkin? Dewd! Don’t do that! Corral them with Password Corral! Check it out!

Cygnus Production’s Password Corral

“Password Corral is our popular freeware password manager. With a clean, easy to use interface, strong encryption and all the features you would expect from a program you’d have to pay for, it’s no wonder thousands of people have made it their choice for password management! Please note, Password Corral runs on the Windows platform only.

Features

Password Corral uses Blowfish or Diamond2 encryption to encrypt all the information you store in the program, keeping it safe from prying eyes. Each password can have both a short description and comments which can also contain hyperlinks to launch your web browser. Each password entry can also have an expiration date to remind you to change the password. The program can be set to time out to the Windows system tray area after a specified period of system inactivity and be protected by your master password, so even if you forget to close Password Corral and walk away from your PC, your password information can still be protected. The program is customizable, allowing you to display your password information unencrypted on the screen, change the display fonts and hyperlink color and modify many of the security aspects of the program. You can export your password data in an encrypted (or unencrypted) format to keep a safe backup of your data or to transfer your passwords to another PC. Best of all Password Corral features a clean, easy to use, standard Windows interface – no wild icons or weird dialog boxes – you’ll be up and running as soon as you start the program!

* Clean, easy to use, standard Windows interface
* Secure Blowfish or Diamond2 encryption
* Multiple password accounts on a single PC
* Create detailed descriptions, usernames, URL, e-mail and comments for each password entry
* Group password data into custom groups you define
* Customizable random password generator
* Hyperlinks in the comments field will launch your web browser
* Password expiration notices
* Create encrypted export files of your password data for backup or import to another PC
* Customizable ‘time-out’ feature to secure the program and your data after a period of system inactivity
* Print hard copies of your password information
* Many Customizable interface elements and security parameters
* Full on-line and ‘What’s This?’ help”

This week’s GSotW was featured in last week’s Dr. Bill.TV. It is a system that allows you to capture video that is streamed from a Microsoft video server. Check it out!

SDP Video Capture Software

“MMS or ‘Microsoft Media Server’ protocol is Microsoft’s proprietary network streaming protocol.”

Configuring a firewall in Linux with iptables can be daunting for a new user… that’s where the graphical application “fwbuilder” comes in! This app will step you through defining your firewall, with helpful comments along the way!

Set up your firewall with Firewall Builder

“Firewall Builder (fwbuilder) is a graphical application that can help you to configure IP traffic filtering. It can compile the filtering policy you define into many specifications, including iptables and various languages used by Cisco and Linksys routers. Separating the actual policy you define and the implementation in this way should let you change what hardware is running your firewall without having to redefine your policy for that platform. Packages for fwbuilder are available in the Ubuntu Hardy and Fedora 9 repositories. fwbuilder is packaged as a 1-Click install for openSUSE 10.3, but not for version 11 as yet.”

This week’s GSoTW is a bit esoteric! If you NEED an MD5 Hash calculator, you will say, “Whoa! Cool!” If not, you will say, “Huh?” So it goes!

On-Line MD5 Hash Calculator

“In Cryptography, MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) is a widely-used cryptographic hash function with a 128-bit hash value. As an Internet standard (RFC 1321), MD5 has been employed in a wide variety of security applications, and is also commonly used to check the integrity of files. MD5 was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function, MD4. In 1996, a flaw was found with the design; while it was not a clearly fatal weakness, cryptographers began to recommend using other algorithms, such as SHA-1 (recent claims suggest that SHA-1 was broken, however). In 2004, more serious flaws were discovered making further use of the algorithm for security purposes questionable. It is now known how to, with a few hours’ work, generate an MD5 collision. That is, to generate two byte strings with the same hash. Since there are a finite number of MD5 outputs (2128), but an infinite number of possible inputs, it has long been known that such collisions must exist, but it had been previously believed to be impractically difficult to find one. The result is that the MD5 hash of some information no longer uniquely identifies it. If I present you with information such as a public key, its MD5 hash might not uniquely identify it; I may have a second public key with the same MD5 hash. However, the present attacks require the ability to choose both messages of the collision. They do not make it easy to perform a pre-image attack, finding a message with a specified MD5 hash, or a second pre-image attack, finding a message with the same MD5 hash as a given message. Thus, old MD5 hashes, made before these attacks were known, are safe for now. In particular, old digital signatures can still be considered reliable. A user might not wish to generate or trust any new signatures using MD5 if there is any possibility that a small change to the text (the collisions being constructed involve flipping a few bits in a 128-byte section of hash input) would constitute a meaningful change. This assurance is based on the current state of cryptanalysis. The situation may change suddenly, but finding a collision with some pre-existing data is a much more difficult problem, and there should be time for an orderly transition.”

This is a really cool, little command line utility that allows you to do some really powerful things via a batch file!

Delen Website

“Delen – DELete ENhanced – is a souped-up version of DEL. It supports extended wildcards and parent directories, as well as date, time and size filters. Files can be excluded from deletion.

Wipe is the same as Delen, but offers secure deletion (PAD file).

XRD – eXtended Remove Directory – is the directory equivalent of Delen.”

This week’s Geek Software of the Week, is a neat, free network tool for Windows XP and Vista!

HoverIP Freeware Web Site

Lot’s more freeware is at this site, but, let’s look at HoverIP:

“With HoverIP you can display your IP configuration (on all network cards), perform different tasks like NSLOOKUP, PING, TRACEROUTE, SCAN PORTS or network, and manage your ROUTES in a very convenient way! Important Note: HoverIP will not work with Windows 95 and has not been tested on all platforms.”

You can use it to change your network info on one simple screen… you can also check to see what ports are open from and to your system. Very cool stuff!